The Power of Yet

I don't like the ballet. I do no come to this conclusion lightly but after years of going to, supporting and not liking the ballet. I admire the otherworldly athleticism. If a master like Tchaikovsky or Stravinsky has composed the music I enjoy it enough on that level. When the women wear flouncy skirts, the way they go up and down when they jump is aesthetically pleasing. Otherwise, I have never found the human leg to be a compelling delivery system for storytelling. 

It gives me no pleasure to tell you this. First, I know which readers are going to be furious about it (hi, Jami!). Furthermore, I am sure that I am wrong. I don't mean that I secretly love the ballet—I don't—but, who am I to question the quality of an art form beloved around the world for some 500 years by people much smarter than me, most notably my wife? Do I think I'm the first person to come up with the white hot take that non-verbal, rhythmic jumping may be an inefficient means of telling the stories of nutcrackers and swan princesses? This is exactly why I phrased the sentence the way I did. I don't believe the ballet is bad, there's too much evidence to the contrary but I do not like it. Even then, I have a suspicion that I'm wrong and there's a non-zero percent chance that I may look back on those words with a sense of embarrassment at what a fool I once was. It would be truer to say I don't like the ballet yet.

As readers of this newsletter, you know that I am wrong a lot. That's a good thing. Being wrong means that you have the capacity (and the willingness) to grow. I think we understand this internally because we teach our children this lesson. Like many his age, Rocky is obsessed with Elmo, the red, high-voiced, first-person-only monster of Sesame Street fame. Elmo's neighbor is Mr. Noodle, who is a dumbass incapable of the simplest tasks. When Elmo asks Mr. Noodle things that my toddler knows, like how to kick a soccer ball, say, or bark like a dog, this smooth-lobed window licker will fail several times before finally pulling off the easy request. Rocky is enthralled by Mr. Noodle. At first, I attributed this to a pre-K version of what adults get out of reality television; self-satisfied knowledge that I'm smarter than this asshole. But there is evidence to suggest that Mr. Noodle teaches kids about sticktoitiveness and, most importantly, that being wrong isn't the end of the world provided that you are trying to get it right. Elmo forgives Mr. Noodle, even when it seems like he's willfully screwing up. 

We forget this lesson in adulthood. Of the many reasons to be critical of cancel culture, one of the most significant is that it robs people of their right to be wrong. I don't mean to wallow in their wrongness, to revel in it and double down on it, of course, but to point out something someone said years ago, or even minutes ago, as an invalidating position is to deny someone the ability to learn from mistakes, the only true way we ever do learn. This denial goes both ways. By cancelling others we get to avoid the hard work of looking inward and question whether someone's offensive view resonates with us, whether we've ever thought something similar, whether we hold opinions like it still. It is easier to cancel a racist than to combat racism, which requires some level of introspection. It is easier to boycott a sexist than to do the heavy lifting of investigating how sexism informs our own lives. Cancel culture allows us to disappear in the mob and move on unexamined. 

Don't get me wrong, the ability to call out unrepentant or criminal bad actors has brought a welcome reckoning in terms of unseating powerfully malignant people and there are some actions that are worthy of cancellation (these are usually called "crimes"). But note the short distance between justice and mob rule. If your opinion or activism is fueled by the fear of not being on the popular side, can you even really call it your opinion? Haven't you given up a little of your individualism to avoid angering the collective? Does that make for a better world? So distrusting of the masses were the Ancient Greeks that their word for everyone, hekatos, was derived from hekas, which means disconnected, separate, far off. You may think it's naive to believe that people can change if given the chance but that's not anymore naive than believing the collective opinion is always correct. 

Questions like “How do you use a fork, Mr. Noodle?” have actual right and wrong answers where ones like “Is the ballet good?” or, more critically, “What is the best way to dismantle systemic racism?” or “How do we fight climate change?” are more nuanced but that’s the complexity of adulthood. One of the reasons I started this newsletter is to make a record of how I think about the world right now. Doing so, I run the risk of being embarrassed by these words at some point in the future. That's fine with me. I don't think of myself as someone given to change but there's no doubt a 25-year-old me would have written a different newsletter, more pessimistic, perhaps, more self-centered (is that possible? I hear you asking). A 15-year-old me would have made much more definitive statements and would certainly have declared "The ballet is bad." 5-year-old me didn't like fish, the idiot. The world is a complicated place and navigating it with any kind of intelligence is going to mean being wrong a certain percentage of the time, and that percentage remains fixed throughout your life as long as you keep thinking. 

We are trained (and sometimes bullied) into believing that public statements must be perfect, that something said out loud, or tweeted, represents something within us that is always true no matter how much time passes. That's a nice ideal, I suppose, but it creates a world where finding evidence that a public figure was less enlightened in their youth or last week means it's time to sharpen the dinner knives. Never mind that our fiction is filled with redemption stories celebrating the transformations of self-centered jerks into good people, fiction that is underwritten by countless real life figures who have changed their views radically from Malcolm X to Glennon Doyle to Saul of Tarsus. When people make mistakes, we profess that these errs are irredeemable. If that were true, punishing their makers would only further the mistake, argues Hannah Arendt. "Forgiveness is the only way to reverse the irreversible flow of history," she writes. I may be wrong but I'm willing to bet we'd have an easier time understanding each other if instead of saying "You're cancelled," to every thing we don't like, we said "Try again, Mr. Noodle." It's what keeps me going to the ballet. One of these times, I'll get it.